Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

I love my Harper Voyager edition of Fahrenheit 451. It’s gorgeous! And it contains a really interesting introduction (yes, I still read those), written by Ray Bradbury for the 50th anniversary. In it, he describes how he wrote the entire book in the typewriter room of his local library. It cost him 10 cents per hour to use the machine, and the earliest draft cost him $9.80 to write, over the course of nine days. “So here, after fifty years, is Fahrenheit 451,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’m glad that it was done.”

This edition also includes Bradbury’s afterword, and he gives some great insights into the book’s publication history. He explains the various difficulties he found in completing and publishing a book that’s ultimately about censorship. The most interesting tidbit, I thought, was this:

“A young Chicago editor, minus cash but full of future visions, saw my manuscript and bought it for four hundred and fifty dollars, all that he could afford, to be published in issues number two, three and four of his about to be born magazine. The young man was Hugh Hefner. The magazine was Playboy, which arrived during the winter of 1953/4 to shock and improve the world. The rest is history.”

Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451 afterword)

Maybe there really is something to the whole “reading Playboy for the articles” thing 😉 Anyway, if Hugh Hefner’s seal of approval doesn’t mean much to you, consider this: Barack Obama is also on record as saying that “Ray Bradbury’s gift for storytelling reshaped our culture and expanded our world,”. Who can argue with praise that high?

Fahrenheit 451 is indeed widely regarded as the best of Bradbury’s works. It’s set in an unspecified city (probably somewhere in the American mid-West) at an unspecified time in the future (probably sometime after 1960). The story follows a fireman, Guy Montag, who becomes disillusioned with his job. See, in Montag’s world, firemen don’t put out fires – they burn books.

The plot kicks off when Montag meets Clarisse, his teenage neighbour and a Manic Pixie Dream Girl who spouts a bunch of free-thinking hippie-dippie bullshit as they walk home together each day. Then, one day, she disappears without explanation. On that basis alone, pretty much, Montag decides to up-end his entire life. The next time he’s called upon to burn books, a stash discovered in the home of a sweet old lady, he nicks one. He wants to see what all the fuss is about for himself.

(That old lady decides to stay with her books, by the way, even as the flames rise and she is burned to death. She’s the real hero of this story, tbh.)

Montag chucks a sickie the next day, and contemplates a change in career. His wife is not impressed in the slightest; she needs him to keep bringing in the Benjamins so she can buy a new flat-screen TV. Montag’s boss shows up, ostensibly to bust his balls for faking a case of gastro, but they end up having a D&M about the true history of how books came to be banned. When the boss leaves, Montag shows his wife the contraband he’s hiding in the roof, and she freaks out even harder. He wants to have a go at reading them (against his wife’s stern advice), so he reaches out to an English professor he met years ago, Faber, and convinces the old guy to help him.

Now, here’s where Montag gets really stupid: he starts flashing his stash of stolen books around in front of his wife’s friends. Understandably, this gives her the shits, and Montag is pretty much on the couch for life at this point. One of her friends tips off the authorities, and Montag’s boss shows up, this time in the firetruck, and commands Montag to burn down his own house. Montag’s all “yeah, okay”, and he does it… but he also knocks out all his co-workers and kills his boss with a flamethrower. That is the final fucking straw for Mrs Montag, and she leaves him to fondle his books on his lonesome.

Montag’s a bit slow on the uptake, but these developments are enough to finally get it through his skull that he Done Fucked Up(TM). Unfortunately, that realisation dawns at the same time that his bad decision making starts paying off. He runs, floating himself down a river, and meets up with a group of drifters. They’ve got this whole keep-literacy-alive-cabal thing going on, and they’ve all memorised books as an act of rebellion against the state. While everyone sits around swapping stories, war is declared on the city from which Montag has just escaped. They can’t do much but sit there, watching bombers fly over-head and drop explodey-things miles away. Everyone, except the drifters, bites the dust.

They’re pretty nonchalant about their narrow escape, however. They sit down to have dinner (seriously, no wonder they were exiled), and listen to their leader give a lecture about phoenixes and mirrors and what not. Then, they all pick up sticks and head back towards the city under the guise of “rebuilding”. (I’m pretty sure they were all dudes, so they might encounter some problems with the re-populating bit, but no one mentions that particular elephant in the room and the book ends without another word about it).

I must say – and I realise how uncool this is to admit – I didn’t care for Fahrenheit 451. On paper, the premise is compelling and I dig it, but the writing seems like a messy patchwork, as though Bradbury was trying to emulate six different authors at once. It’s got a real young adult vibe, which is probably why it’s so popular as a prescribed high-school read. I probably would have got a lot more out of it if I’d read it for the first time back then. As it stands, for present-day me, it was just… meh. Another one that didn’t live up to the hype. Bradbury perhaps just didn’t spend enough time or give himself enough space to do his great premise justice in the prose.

He had plenty of material to work with, after all. He was inspired by the destruction of the Library Of Alexandria, horrified by Nazi book burnings and Stalin’s Great Purge, and nostalgic for the Golden Age of Radio (he probably listened to Video Killed The Radio Star on repeat for years). Bradbury saw new forms of media as a threat to literacy and books, as though mass media would cause us all to forget how to read. Montag’s wife and her vapid friends were basically his way of foreshadowing the Kardashians. Usually, when we talk about Fahrenheit 451, it’s in the context of a cautionary tale against state-based censorship, but Bradbury did his best to play down those elements, especially later in life; he was hell-bent on retrofitting his mass-media-is-evil message into his best-known work.

Are you ready for a heaping serve of irony? Fahrenheit 451 was subjected to serious expurgation by its publisher not long after it was first released. Ballantine Books released the “Bal-Hi Edition” 1967, targeted at the high-school students with whom they realised it had become popular. They censored words like “hell”, “damn”, and “abortion”, amending seventy-five passages all told. At first, they published both the censored and the uncensored versions side-by-side, but by 1973 only the censored version was being re-printed. Bradbury didn’t even know about any of this until 1979, when one of his friends showed him an expurgated copy. I’d imagine he hit the roof harder than it has ever been hit before, and someone at Ballantine got fired (maybe a lot of someones).

By 1980, they were back to publishing the original, uncensored version. Bradbury has since referred to the practice as “manuscript mutilation”, so I think he held onto that grudge for a good, long while. While the reinstatement of the original text is undoubtedly a win in the battle against censorship, it’s meant that the book has been subject to multiple instances of banning and redaction in schools and libraries. What does it take to convince yourself that banning a book about censorship is a good idea? Smh…

But not everyone’s that silly, and plenty of very clever people have really loved Bradbury’s magnum opus. In 1954, Fahrenheit 451 won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award In Literature. Thirty years later, in 1984, it won the Prometheus “Hall Of Fame” award. And then again, twenty years after that, it won a “Retro” Hugo Award (one of only six Best Novel Retro Hugos ever given). Fahrenheit 451 has also been adapted a few times over. Bradbury himself published a stage-play version of the story in 1979, and (despite his apparent objection to mass media) helped develop an interactive computer version of the game based on the book in 1984. More recently, HBO released a television film of the novel, which revived interest in its timely message.

Anyway, here’s my tl;dr summary: a middle-aged straight white guy in a dystopian future burns books for a living, until he meets a seventeen-year-old hottie and decides to have a mid-life crisis. *shrugs* I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I really wasn’t that fussed on it. I think Fahrenheit 451 is great for high schoolers, and its premise is fascinating, but unfortunately the writing itself just doesn’t live up to the hype. I’ll the shelving this one on my good-to-have-read-so-I-don’t-have-to-pretend-I-did-anymore shelf, and moving right along.

P.S. Almost everyone knows this already, but I figured I’d tack it on to the end here, just in case you missed it: Fahrenheit 451 got its title from a conversation Bradbury had with a fire-fighter about the temperature at which book paper burns. There was a bit of a miscommunication, though; 451 degrees Fahrenheit is actually the temperature at which paper spontaneously ignites (i.e., starts to burn without exposure to a flame). Book burning, of the type depicted in Bradbury’s story, actually occurs at a much lower temperature. But why let the truth get in the way of a good title, eh? I got more cool bookish trivia here, if you want to check it out.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Fahrenheit 451:

• “If you haven’t read it,you better.” – Amazon Customer
• “Makes kids hate reading!” – j busby
• “Only got half way through, was a downer burned books?” – KAREN K. FOOTE
• “Literary sorts probably jerk off to books like this, but frankly it was just disjointed, poorly-constructed, lazy plagiarism of “1984”. Reads like an elementary student wrote it, to be frank.” – James Potter
• “this is probably the worst book ever. not only is it horrible, the plot is awful. they are wasting their time burning other books when this is the book they should burning. would not recommend this to anyone” – Alex
• “Very much the American 1984… and I don’t mean that in a good way. While Orwell’s work is subtle, entertaining, intelligent and incredibly powerful, Fahrenheit 451 spoon feeds you it’s message like a patronising primary school teacher.
  
It leaves no room for interpretation or thought and comes across as a 14 year old’s attempt to write something clever, rather than bringing forth any original or interesting insight. Worse than this though, it fails to be entertaining, and being entertaining, even in a novel with a message (even one as simple as “doing bad things is bad”, which is what 451’s amounts to) should be the primary aim.
  
The writing style is convoluted and childish, the story containing zero original concepts, and the whole thing is just rather uninspiring. I strongly suspect the only reason this book gained so much attention is because of the nationality of its author, as it is perhaps the only American title tackling government in a way unrelated to race or sexism.

  

In short, if you’re considering reading this, don’t. Bradbury is to Orwell what a wet turd is to a filet mignon, so go with the latter. If you’ve already read Orwell’s works then don’t bother with 451, it doesn’t even verge on the same calibre.” – Amazon Customer

• “There was writing throughout the entire book” – Taylor
• “This book sucks so much. It is the worst, most pretentious piece of crap I have ever read. I had to read it for school and I couldn’t even finish this poorly written atrocious piece of crap. If this book had a face, I’d punch it in the balls. Zero stars.” – Tyra Howell